The Adversary

by Michael Walters

  There was a battered kitchen table, now only half a meter or so below his dangling feet. He scrambled for a moment, then dropped, trying to land safely on the polished wooden table top.

  His feet hit the table and skidded so that he slipped sideways, his fingers desperately clutching for some kind of purchase. His stomach landed heavily on the table surface and then, just when he thought he had landed safely, he heard the sound of cracking wood as one of the table legs shattered beneath his weight. The table tipped sideways, and Tunjin toppled off to one side, landing heavily among a pile of empty paint-pots, as the table fell across him.

  For a moment there was silence, and Tunjin lay breathing heavily, convinced that every bone in his body was broken. It took him a few moments to realize that this probably wasn’t the case, and that he appeared to have survived the fall with no more serious consequences than some bruising.

  He pulled himself into a sitting position, pushing the table away from him, trying to maneuver his body away from the scattered pile of paint tins. For a moment, he felt relief. He was alive. He had—at least for the moment—escaped.

  Then his relief vanished, to be replaced by a gut-wrenching fear. He choked, feeling waves of nausea sweeping over him, as though all the symptoms of his hangover, having been suppressed during his traverse of the rooftops, were now returning in redoubled form.

  The two barrels of a shotgun were inches from his face, pointing unwaveringly at his forehead.

  From behind them, a quiet voice said: “I do hope you’re going to clean all this up.”

  CHAPTER 7

  “But you know what he’s up to. It’s what he’s always up to. Undermining you.”

  Doripalam shook his head, trying to close his eyes. The sight of his wife pacing up and down the room always made his head ache. “I don’t think that’s it,” he said. “I don’t think that’s really ever been it. But certainly not this time.” He had a small glass of vodka in his hands, chilled from the fridge, and he wanted just to enjoy it, but Solongo, as so often, seemed to have other plans.

  “You’re just too trusting, that’s your trouble. That’s always been your trouble. You let people walk all over you.”

  He knew she meant well. She always meant well. That was part of the problem. Of course, she was concerned for her own interests—who wasn’t? But, deep down, he was convinced that this wasn’t simply selfishness, that she really did care about his own interests as well. But then, he reflected, maybe he was just too trusting.

  “Why should he want to undermine me? He appointed me into the job.”

  “He wouldn’t have appointed anyone into the job if he could have helped it, you know that. He’d have been in the job himself. For life.”

  “But now he isn’t in it. He’s in a much bigger job. So why should he care about me?”

  “Because you’re in the job that he used to do—that he still wants to do—and you’re handling it far better than he ever could.”

  This was rare. Solongo was generally reluctant to make positive comments about her husband, even when criticizing her favorite hate figure—his former boss, Nergui. Maybe this was some sort of positive sign.

  He opened his eyes and took a cautious sip of the vodka. “Well, I’m flattered that you should think so,” he said, trying his hardest not to sound sarcastic.

  “Well, it’s obvious,” she said. “You’re no fool, Doripalam, even if you quite often act like one. You can do your job very capably. Nergui’s going to feel threatened.”

  Doripalam found it difficult to envisage Nergui feeling threatened even by physical violence, let alone by the possibility that some youngster might possibly upstage him. “But even if that’s true,” he said, “it doesn’t explain what he’s up to at the moment. Why he’s been so keen to lead this inquiry.”

  “Are you sure he’s not going to offer you up as a sacrificial lamb?” Solongo said. She finally sat down and picked up her own glass of vodka, watching him carefully. “I mean, I know he’d made all these positive noises. But this case with—what’s his name? The gangster?”

  “Muunokhoi.”

  “Yes, Muunokhoi. Well, this case would give Nergui all the ammunition he needs if he wants to get rid of you.”

  “And replace me how? There’s no one else who could do the job. No one who would want it, anyway.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe Nergui would bring it back under his own empire again. I’m sure he’s arrogant enough to think he could do both jobs without breaking sweat.”

  “You’re just paranoid,” he said.

  But maybe she was right to be. Doripalam looked around the living room in which they were sitting. A decent-sized room in a decent-sized apartment in one of the better areas of the city. A large leather sofa, thick crimson pile carpets, expensive rugs and a scattering of tasteful ornaments and paintings. It really wasn’t too bad. He’d progressed much further in his life and career than he had ever really believed possible, even if it wasn’t yet quite as far as Solongo would have preferred. His father—a factory worker under the old regime—wouldn’t have believed that his son would ever be living in a palatial residence like this.

  So maybe Solongo was right. Perhaps the Muunokhoi case could be the one that stripped him of all this. It had happened on his watch. And arguably he should have been more observant. After the event, he had heard countless rumors about Tunjin. Tunjin’s instability since he had split with his wife. Tunjin’s insubordination. Tunjin’s drinking. Especially Tunjin’s drinking. He had obviously kept it well under control during work time, since Doripalam had never seen any signs of it. But it was now clear that, outside working hours, Tunjin was drinking heavily—that he was regularly found semi-comatose in various of the more unsavory bars around the city. Doripalam suspected that a number of Tunjin’s colleagues had covered up for him over the years, getting him home when perhaps, in other circumstances, he would have found himself in a prison cell for the night.

  So, yes, perhaps it was reasonable that his neck should be on the block over this. But he still couldn’t believe that Nergui would be the one to raise the ax.

  He sat back in the crimson leather armchair, sipping on his vodka. “Anyway, I still think there’s more to it than that. This isn’t about me. It’s about Nergui in some way—”

  “It’s always about Nergui,” Solongo said. She stretched out her legs, smiling at her husband and shaking her head. She really was a remarkably elegant woman, Doripalam thought, wondering yet again how it was that he’d come to be married to her. She was most definitely out of his league, not just in terms of her beauty but also in terms of her social status. Her father had been a senior party officer under the old regime—one of the small elite who had prospered under the yoke of communism. Doripalam had met him only a few times before his death, and he had never been quite sure what the old man’s role had actually been, which was probably ominous enough in itself. But there was no doubt that it had been accompanied by significant wealth and power, most of which he had apparently managed to hang on to even after the arrival of democracy.

  He also wondered, in his more suspicious moments, whether the old man had, somewhere in his working life, stumbled up against Nergui. That, he thought, might explain Solongo’s antagonism.

  “You’re far too naïve,” she said, breaking into his thoughts. “You assume that everyone’s as well-intentioned and altruistic as you are.” She gazed at him, with an expression that might have been affectionate, but which was also oddly reminiscent of a young girl’s attitude toward her favorite pet or doll.

  “Whereas you know differently,” he said.

  He swallowed the last of his vodka and moved to pour himself another, gesturing with the bottle toward Solongo. She held up her nearly full glass and shook her head. “And you drink too much,” she said.

  Maybe that was true, too. Doripalam had certainly become conscious of an increase in his alcohol consumption over the last few months, particularly as the Muunokhoi
case had collapsed. It was still just a few glasses in the evening, but it had increasingly become a welcome retreat from the pressures of the day. He thought again about Tunjin, and wondered at what point Tunjin’s own drinking had tipped over from social relaxation into something much darker and more dangerous. Would Doripalam ever recognize that point if he were to approach it himself?

  “So what do you think Nergui’s up to?” he said, refilling his glass and slumping back down by her side. “Other than undermining me. I mean, Nergui’s right. There was always going to have to be an inquiry about the Muunokhoi case. The Minister’s already taken too much flak in Parliament. He’s got to demonstrate that he’s doing something.”

  “But why does Nergui have to run it?” Solongo said. “Surely he’s the last person who should be involved?”

  “That’s what I said,” Doripalam countered, defensively. “I thought there’d be a conflict of interest. But Nergui didn’t seem very bothered about that. He obviously wants to use this for his own ends, which seem to be about cleaning up the team once and for all. But I’ve no idea quite how he thinks he’s going to do that.”

  “And do you have any idea what all this might do to you?”

  Doripalam took a deep swallow of the vodka. “I’m just hoping that Nergui will protect me more than anyone else might care to do.”

  She shook her head slowly, smiling at him. “I think it’s rather sweet that you’re so trusting,” she said. “I just hope that you’re right.”

  While he waited, Nergui thumbed for the fourth or fifth time through the spiral notebook in which he’d jotted down all his thoughts on the Muunokhoi case. He’d spent most of the day sitting in that cramped office working his way through the various relevant files—the case file itself, files relating to various other past cases that he thought might potentially be relevant, Tunjin’s personal file, personal files relating to a number of other officers, even Doripalam’s own personal file.

  The last of these was not stored within police headquarters, in recognition of Doripalam’s seniority, but held in the Ministry itself. Strictly speaking, it was accessible only by Doripalam’s own line manager within the police hierarchy. But Nergui had quickly discovered that, in the face of his own assumed proximity to the Minister, very few Ministry doors remained closed for very long. Even so, he felt mildly guilty that he had taken advantage of his unofficial authority in this particular case. He told himself that his motives were good, but had also made every effort to ensure that no trace of the file would be found within police headquarters. At the end of the day, he had taken the file back to his own apartment and locked it safely away in his well-concealed strongbox. He would return it to the Ministry in the morning, still unsure whether he had made an error in removing it in the first place.

  And now, thirty minutes later, he was sitting among the bright décor of Millie’s Café in the Center Hotel, sipping a coffee and wondering if he was about to commit another error.

  He looked around him. It would have been difficult to imagine, even five years ago, that places like this would have appeared in the city. Nergui still felt that there was something unpalatable about the existence of such outlets alongside the poverty and deprivation that continued to dominate large parts of the country. It was only a few winters ago that there were people literally dying on the steppes—caught between the natural rigors of the harshest weather in memory and the man-made pressures of the new free market economy. And yet now here were throngs of well-dressed, prosperous people, locals and westerners alike, sipping freshly squeezed orange and fancy coffees to the burbling sounds of American pop music.

  Nergui had spent enough time in the West to be used to this kind of thing, though he never understood why the Americans deluded themselves they could make coffee. Here, though, he could get the Italian-style coffee he liked. He sipped slowly on his espresso and continued to leaf through the notebook.

  It was telling him nothing new, but he had not expected that it would. He was at the stage—which he recalled well from his days as a more conventional investigating officer—when the priority was simply to ensure that he knew the facts as well as he could. He always felt that it was critical that he should be able to piece together all aspects of each case thoroughly in his mind. In this way, if he subsequently stumbled upon some new piece of information, some anomaly, he could isolate it immediately. He had a good memory, but it was far from photographic. Nevertheless, if he worked hard he could embed detail in his mind sufficiently comprehensively that he would know instantly if something didn’t fit. It was a useful skill particularly in more complicated cases when key details could easily be overlooked simply because it was assumed that they had already been addressed.

  In this case, though, he still wasn’t sure quite how much he was investigating, quite how far this went. The immediate concern, of course, was Tunjin’s falsification of evidence. There was no real doubt there, though it was far from obvious to Nergui how it had been exposed in the first place. The forged documents were not particularly sophisticated, but they would probably have passed muster with the Prosecutor’s Office if someone hadn’t started raising questions internally. But where those questions had first arisen, no-one seemed sure.

  Lacking any other sense of direction, Nergui had worked his way through the piles of individual staff files for the officers. The majority, including Tunjin’s, yielded little that was unexpected. He had asked for the files relating to other cases that had been dropped or abandoned, but had been told that the numbers were so large that it would be easier for Nergui to visit the archives for himself. He had done so, and had spent part of an afternoon plowing disconsolately through page after page of uninformative paperwork. Somewhere in here might be the single thread that would start everything unraveling, but it would take weeks of work to uncover it.

  In the end, with no other way forward, he had returned to the bulging pile of files, dating back nearly two decades, that related to Muunokhoi. The content here was at least moderately interesting. Muunokhoi was a figure well-known to the police in Ulan Baatar, just as, for different reasons, he was familiar to most of the adult population of the country. The files, in accordance with Muunokhoi’s status, comprised an odd mix of formal case documentation and endless newspaper clippings.

  When had he first encountered Muunokhoi? He had been aware of the name for a long time—nearly twenty years. He had heard the rumors along with everyone else. From time to time, and more frequently as the years went by, he had had reasons to investigate Muunokhoi’s activities. But they had finally come face-to-face a decade before.

  They had brought him in, initially only as a potential witness, in connection with the torching of a garment warehouse on the south side of the city—a massive blaze that spread into surrounding buildings and resulted in three deaths and the evacuation of a neighboring residential block. There was little doubt that the cause was arson, and the first assumption was that it was a straightforward case of insurance fraud. But the owner of the warehouse, initially the primary suspect, had been quick to point the finger at Muunokhoi’s people. “We find them importing shoddy versions of our goods—pirated copies—selling them for a fraction of the price. But that is not enough for them. They have to destroy my business, destroy my property, even kill my staff. I know who they are—”

  Given that the apparent victim’s business was already in trouble as a result of this new competition, it was equally likely that he had himself arranged for the warehouse to be torched. But it had provided Nergui with an opportunity to bring Muunokhoi in for questioning.

  Muunokhoi had still been a young man—thirty-two years old according to the files, although Nergui had suspected that this was a conservative figure. But he was already on his way to becoming a legend.

  Nergui still remembered his first impressions. A slim, good-looking young man, at ease with himself, exuding a self-confidence that bordered on arrogance. He had been sitting in the interview room, apparently untroubled,
one leg slung over the side of the metal chair. It was a room designed to intimidate, but somehow Muunokhoi managed to dominate it.

  “You wish to speak with me?” he said, in the manner of one granting an exclusive interview.

  Nergui had lowered himself into the chair opposite. “We wish you to provide a witness statement, yes.”

  “Only too happy to be of assistance. I admire the work you people do.”

  “We’re very grateful,” Nergui said. He raised his eyes and stared unblinkingly at the young man. “I’m sure the sentiment is reciprocated.”

  “I’m sure it is. So what can I tell you?”

  Nergui ran through the circumstances of the case, as far as he was able to reveal them. He was aware that there was little here of substance. They had no evidence, other than the warehouse owner’s accusations, to link Muunokhoi to the fire. Even if Muunokhoi had been involved, Nergui had little doubt that any connection would have been remote and well-concealed. They were going through the motions, making sure that every stone had been upturned. And, Nergui hoped, recording just one tiny theoretical strike against Muunokhoi’s apparently untainted record. Perhaps one day they might accumulate enough strikes to count for something.

  Muunokhoi had laughed, as Nergui had known he would. “This is what you’ve dragged me in here for?”

  Nergui shrugged. “It’s our job. We have to investigate every possibility.”

  Muunokhoi had nodded, apparently earnestly. “Of course. I understand that. You have to eliminate witnesses.” Something about his tone suggested that this was, perhaps, a familiar concept.

  “As you say. Of course, we would like to eliminate you.” Nergui’s gaze was unwavering.

  Muunokhoi nodded. “I can provide an alibi.”

  “I’m sure you can,” Nergui said. “That is not really the issue. I think there is no suggestion that you started this blaze yourself. The question is whether you might have had an interest in it being started.”